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Modular: The Modern Way of Manufacturing Injectables

Flexibility allows manufactures to meet the needs of the growing and versatile injectables market.

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Modular manufacturing is on the rise in the pharmaceutical industry. The last few years have shown an increase of interest in modular solutions for a variety of uses and Stevanato Group–a provider of integrated systems for pharma and healthcare–projects that this tendancy will only continue, especially in injectables.

This popularity is due to the flexibility offered by modular manufacturing, allowing pharmaceutical processors to produce a range of products in a single facility with faster changeovers and improved overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). Modular manufacturing breaks down a system into discrete component “modules” that perform specific roles and can be integrated into or removed from the overall structure at will.

The following factors are driving this movement in the injectables market:

  • Many treatments are moving from hospital to home, reducing costs for healthcare providers and increasing patient comfort, requiring the need for user-friendly injectable devices, which has been further exacerabated by the COVID-19 pandemic
  • The demand for auto-injectors and pen injectors is skyrocketing as life-style related diseases, such as diabetes, become more widespread in both developed and developing countries and as the niche of targeted small batch and personalized medicines, including oncological formulations and certain biologics, grows, driving the need for more mobile, less intrusive, and simpler solutions that remain cost-effective, which in turn demands flexibility on the manufacturing side

These self-administered options allow patients to treat themselves more independently and autonomously than ever in a safe manner. As editor Aaron Hand says in Burgeoning Auto-Injector Market Demands Flexible Production Options, “Auto-injectors help avoid common risks associated with self-administration via syringes, such as incorrect dosages and misuse, serious injuries and discontinuation of treatment.” 

The benefits for healthcare providers and patients are clear. As injectables continue to become more customized and self-administered, manufacturers will need to modify the design, engineering, and production of their assembly line equipment to meet these and future demands. This will in turn benefit manufacturers–contractors and service providers in particular, who will need to prove adaptable–as the industry will continue to evolve with varying shapes, sizes, and materials of injectables as well as in product volumes, demand, and sub-categorical issues like target audience differentiation. Production processes will need to be time-efficient and customizable.

A Pharmaceutical Networking article, Defining ideal modular design for effective pharma packaging, seconds this perspective and explains that the modular design must be adapted to the existing development process and embedded into ongoing operations during implementation in order to minimize adaptation demands which will surely come.

Automation and Pharma 4.0

Stevanato Group outlines characteristics that modular manufacturing has that assembly machinery needs in order to keep up with the needs of modern combination products: fast format changeover to reduce costly downtime, flexibility to allow reduced CAPEX investments and achieve shorter time to market, and scalability for additional modules to meet increased volumes.


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